Why I Choose Email over Messaging

Summary

My colleagues and friends know that I prefer to communicate with them via email rather than chat messaging. There are many benefits in such a choice. You may want to consider them and adopt the same stance. Unified inbox My messages arrive in a single program, where I can process and tag them. With messaging programs I’d have to iterate through Teams, Signal, WhatsApp, Slack, Viber, FaceTime, LinkedIn, Messenger, Google Meet, Discord, Mattermost, Instagram, WebEx, and possibly others, to collect and process the messages sent on each platform. Unified archive Similarly, if I want to find a past message I have exactly one place to search: my email archive. Long term availability Companies get out of business or become acquired and services can easily be discontinued; for a reminder have a look at the 64 services Google has discontinued. If you ever exchanged messages on ICQ, AIM, MSN Messenger, Skype, Yahoo! Messenger, Google Hangouts, GChat, BlackBerry Messenger, or Campfire your messages are now gone. With email and local message storage you control the lifetime of your messages (provided you perform regular backups). My email archive contains the messages I have sent and received from 1986 onward. Rich functionality Email clients offer rich functionality. In the Thunderbird email client, I use the following features: Folders for categorizing important messages. Filters to file messages into folders and to avoid some spam. Send-later functionality to manage message flows. Tagging messages that require special handling (e.g. pending action, handle at home, or handle at work). Address book, with auto-filled salutations in two languages as a custom field. Macros to automate the signing and sending of attachments. Sorting of messages through various fields (sender, date, topic). Sophisticated message search based on arbitrary field contents and their combinations. Off-line message processing and composition. Some messaging systems offer some of these features, but all f...